Currently I am at work on several publications, which I see as part of three clusters of questions and arguments about European history.
First, I am interested in the historical dynamics between human mobility and industrial modernity in continental Europe. I argue that migration—particularly migration over long distances—was no mere consequence of industrialization in Europe but also acted as a constitutive force in the industrializing process. In my forthcoming book manuscript The Migrant’s Spirit. How Industrial Revolution Came to the German Lands, I explore the impact of nearly a century of large-scale emigration to North America on economic culture, institutions, work, and commercial law in German-speaking central Europe.
In a second, related line of inquiry, I am wrestling with our current periodization of economic modernity in Europe. Textbook narratives suggest that a major rupture occurred at the end of the eighteenth century, when European society became “capitalist”: that is, when an earlier moral economy was displaced by our present market economy. My research suggests that there was less displacement, and more continuity, than we are inclined to think. In a forthcoming journal article, I turn to the history of the mercantile city of Frankfurt/Main to show how corporatist forms of business have remained intact through the centuries, particularly in the spheres of finance and banking.
My newest research asks how transatlantic migration and industrialization shaped, and were shaped by, Europe’s ecology and physical environments. The question lies at the heart of my second book project on the Rhine River valley, a region that extends from the river’s headwaters in the Alps to the North Sea. One of Europe’s chief economic arteries, the Rhine and its environs were also directly implicated in the European exodus to the Americas. The valley’s physical environment thus bears the scars of both events—and, I suspect, offers fresh insight into how this region became a focal point of European mobility and economic dynamism.
I’m a social historian of modern Europe. Everyday lives and experiences stand at the core of my research. The sites of social interaction that interest me most are the workplace, the market, and commerce, from rudimentary barter to high finance. I tend to approach these social worlds in the tradition of E.P. Thompson, in that I am interested in reconstructing the moral economies that lend meaning to all social activity, from village bread riots to transoceanic migration.
Trained in global history, I also believe that writing good history requires acute awareness of global contexts and deep history. This is especially true of the nineteenth century, a period that both was shaped by hundreds of years of prior globalization and that witnessed global interactions between peoples and cultures on a new scale all its own. I do not think that all local histories have a global dimension--only that all global histories manifest themselves locally.
